Silicon Valley wants us to believe that their autonomous products are a kind of self-guided magic, but the technology is clearly not there yet. A quick peak behind the curtain has consistently revealed a product base that, at a minimum, is still deeply reliant on human workforces.
Remote human intervention when automated systems fail should be expected and required to be honest with current technology. There are simply too many edge cases in the real world, even with the trillions of miles Tesla has trained their system on.
When will the intervention be called upon? How we react is defined by the context we have. Imagine being dropped into a pre accident situation without any context.
No idea, and I doubt they’ll ever publicly say.
Direct human intervention is definitely something other companies could be doing more of. Waymo especially given all the videos of them getting stuck, sometimes en masse.
I had heard through a friend who works at Waymo they currently have 1.5 engineers per car. Ideally, if you want a self-driving car company to be financially successful, that number should be significantly less than 1. These companies are heavily propped up by VC money and it’s not at all clear they’ll achieve that goal.
Remote human intervention when automated systems fail should be expected and required to be honest with current technology.
The “human in the loop” is one of those things that sounds good but isn’t at all in reality.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/30/a-neck-in-a-noose/
A human was literally sitting at the wheel as Uber’s taxi ran someone over.
Driving is nothing but edge cases, and that’s why maybe paying drivers to drive people around is better than some half-baked AI driving people under trucks and hoping a call center employee is paying enough attention to bail them out.
